Greening The Apocalypse

Can we help reverse climate change while creating more productive, profitable, ecologically functional and beautiful rural landscapes? Connor Stedman joins us to argue the case that yes, we can. Connor is a field ecologist, environmental planner, and farm planner at Appleseed Permaculture in New York state, USA, and runs an internationally recognised course on 'carbon farming'. Books mentioned: The Carbon Farming Solution by Eric Toensmeier and Drawdown edited by Paul Hawken.

Sometimes it feels like billionaire Elon Musk - the Paypal co-founder and and main force behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors - is single handedly revitalising that mid-20th Century spirit of can-do capitalism, upgraded with a eco-green racing stripe. He's a company owner that's captured the public imagination in a way that makes Apple's Steve Jobs seem so pedestrian. Elon also says he can bring a human telepathy device to market in four years, and that he's planning to build a city on Mars. His company Tesla Motors is worth 125 times more per car it produces than General Motors. How much of his empire is based on reality? How much is based on his cult of personality? And what does it tell us about a world tired of cynicism and searching for a hero? To discuss we're joined by our friend, ecologist and computer geek, Rafael Schouten.

What exciting crops can we grow in the backyard that you can't readily get in the supermarket, and what crops are adapted to a warming climate?We're joined by Dr Chris Williams who researches and teaches about the social, cultural and technical aspects of urban agriculture at the Burnley Campus of Melbourne University. Amongst his many interests he runs the Novel Crops Project which identifies less widely grown food plants for cultivation in Melbourne gardens, for example, sweet potato and taro. The Project is trying to keep people excited about the idea of 'edible landscapes', gardens that look great and inviting but also provide food. Check out Chris's blog: People, Plants, Landscape.

We need to rapidly draw down carbon from the atmosphere, and radically reduce the amount we are pumping out at the same time. If that were achievable, what might the world look like? What would our lives be like in 2040? To explore this, we welcome back Seona Candy, research fellow with the Victorian Eco-innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne. VEIL and Seona are a part of the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRCLCL) and their Visions and Pathways 2040 (VP2040) project. VP2040 is a research and engagement project to develop, analyse and communicate visions and pathways for transforming Australian cities to achieve rapid decarbonisation and increased resilience in the face of climate change. And their latest and final report -- the result of their multidisciplinary four year study just came out. It explore two very different scenarios for achieving a low carbon world.

Bushy, Kate and Jed (all parents) and Adam (who's childless) take some time to consider the reasons or not for bringing kids into the world, a world threatened by resource depletion, climate change and other ecological crises.

Charles Massy gained a Bachelor of Science in the 70s before returning to the family farm near Cooma and the Snowy Mountains. He has been farming since, and in 2009 Charles Massy returned to ANU to complete a PhD in Human Ecology. In his latest book Call of the Reed Warbler he explores regenerative agriculture; an approach to farming that rebuilds topsoil, increases biodiversity, and importantly for Australia, resurrects eroded land and combats climate change. Charles joins us in the studio. Here's Sarah's review of the book.

On 11 November, Arts House will transform the North Melbourne Town Hall into an Emergency Relief Centre. The project is called Refuge, and we're joined by Arts House producer Tara Prowse to discuss this collaboration between artists, emergency services and the public. The theme of Refuge this year is heat waves, and to tell us how Melbourne and Australia will be effected by heat and other extreme weather events in the future we're joined by storm chaser and Melbourne University climate scientist Andrew King.(Photo by MusikAnimal licensed CC BY-SA 4.0)

We speak with Daryl Taylor, a survivor of the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Kinglake. In 2009 when that enormous tragedy hit, Daryl already had over a decade's experience in community and organisational development roles. And since that day in February he has been involved on many informal and formal community based recovery and advocacy projects. His work has been acknowledged with 13 state and national awards and best practice commendations. And his experiences in the aftermath of the fires deeply inform his work now - and have lead him to reflect on the creative chaos of bottom up community-led responses, compared to what he saw as poorly fitting and disempowering government responses. In 2015 he completed with his colleague Helen Goodman a two year report Place-Based and Community-Led: Specific Disaster Preparedness and Generalisable Community Resilience which he hopes can help communities learn from Kinglake's experiences. Later in the show we talk with small farmer Tammi Jonas about her battle with reg

Steve Keen is professor and Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University in London. He's credited with being one of the few economists who warned of the Global Financial Crisis and his books include 2001's Debunking Economics and his just published Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? He joins us from Amsterdam to discuss the incredible blindspot at the heart of mainstream economics, why Australia looks vulnerable to a financial crisis, and what individuals and policy makers might do about it.Follow Steve's work at:www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen

We chat with Katherine Wilson, author of Tinkering: Australians Reinvent DIY Culture. She says "home-based tinkering - the everyday commitment to material problem-solving - is emerging as a legitimate vocation, in ways we haven't seen since pre-industrial times." We talk about the joys of pulling things apart and putting things together.

Our guest this episode believes there is a third way which challenges the dichotomous view that when it comes to forestry, one ought to be either a conservationist or profiteer. Rowan Reid is a scientist and himself a farmer and forester. He's also been a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Uni for 20 years, and is the managing director of the not-for profit Australian Agroforestry Foundation. He won the 2001 Australian Eureka Prize for Excellence in Environmental Education for his farmer course: The Australian Master TreeGrower). His farm Bambra Agroforestry Farm in the Otway Ranges is set up as an outdoor classroom and living laboratory for tree growing, and it has had over 10,000 visitors come on tours. Since 1985 he's written or co-authored nine books on related topics, the latest of which and surely his magnum opus, is truly wonderful Heartwood: The Art and Science of Growing Trees for Conservation and Profit.

We speak with Craig Byatt and Liz Franzmann about their recent experience building a tiny house.Craig Byatt is a holistic architect and Liz has a background in sustainability and project management. We spoke about how the demand for tiny houses is on the rise despite the average size of the new Australian home being a whopping 231 square metres.We discussed the laws around tiny houses and the way that councils are playing a game of catch up in this area. We looked at examples of tiny houses being used in a social justice context, for example, Quixote Village in the US is one of the first tiny house communities set up to address issues of homelessness.Later in the show we hear from Nick Lamberton who until last week lived in a tiny house (and ran a tropical fish breeding enterprise) in a western suburbs caravan park for eight years. We discuss this article: Reclaiming "Redneck" Urbanism: What Urban Planners can Learn from Trailer Parks, and what life was actually like in an urban caravan park. Craig and Liz ar

We're joined by eloquent US podcaster KMO, who has made hundreds of hours of fascinating radio through The C-Realm, which covers many of the same topics as Greening the Apocalypse, only he's been at it since 2006. KMO shares his personal journey from a well paid early Amazon employee -- a time when he was inspired by techno-utopian visions -- to an out-of-work divorcee feeling more attracted to doomsday scenarios; and we discuss what role psychology plays into our visions for the future. If you want to hear the longer version of KMO's story check out C-Realm Radio 045 from about 30 minutes in -- it's great radio.

Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and activist on social, environmental and spiritual issues. His books include Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power described as "world changing" by George Monbiot, "life changing" by the Bishop of Liverpool and "truly mental" by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. His two most recent books are Spiritual Activism - Leadership as Service co-authored with Matt Carmichael and Poacher's Pilgrimage: an Island Journey. He joins us via the wires to talk about growing up on an island community, experiencing Papua New Guinea, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful and experinceing the poverty of affluence, and his life long work to emphasise the importance of cultures of place and his experience of rebuilding them after forcible displacement on the Isle of Eigg and in urban settings with his GalGael project. We also touch on the island Presbyterian heritage he shares with Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump who "was wrung from the loins of a woman from Lewis" and how

We talk with David Platt from Resilient Futures to remove the buzzword tag from 'disruption' and actually provide some insight to how changes and adaptation in people, community and technology have always been with us, and always will be, but we can develop strategies to work with the grain of change.

With Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steven Hawking all warning that future artificial intelligences of our own creation may pose existential threats to humanity, we delve into both the risks as well as utopian visions surrounding superintelligent AI as we are joined by Adam Ford of Science, Technology & the Future. We make a few references to Nick Bostrom's excellent book Superintelligence. Max Tegmark's new book Life 3.0 is a more approachable introduction.

The marvellous Prof Tim Flannery was once described by the Financial Times as akin to a cross between Charles Darwin and Indiana Jones for his pioneering mammalogy and paleontology field work. But he gave up this adventurous life to focus on climate change writing and campaigning. Tim drops into the studio and we discuss why, and talk about his new book (his second follow up to the highly influential The Weather Makers): Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument For How To Feed, Power, and Clean Up The World.

We're joined by punk rock icon and vegan athlete John Joseph, author of Meat is For Pussies: A How-To-Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass, and Take Names. Before John was lead singer of The Cro Mags, he grew up on the streets and in foster homes. Got into gangs. He was drug mule. Stabbed. Shot. Went to jail. Went AWOL from the navy. Now at the age of 55 he's a plant powered triathlete, author and spiritual warrior. Sarah Coles interviewed him as John was in his tour van travelling through Kansas with his new band, Bloodclot.

Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins describes the late historian and green economist David Fleming as "one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, under-rated and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years." Fleming thought the globalised market economy would, in the not too distant future, begin to fail as it faces limits to growth from resource depletion, and said: "Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility. But it has the decisive argument in its favour that there is no alternative." And his work explores how we can create rich local cultures and economies as an alternative to global capitalism.Fleming died suddenly in 2010, but his good friend, Shaun Chamberlin has recently turned a manuscript Fleming left behind, into two books: his magnum opus, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, and a smaller introductory text, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. We speak to Shaun by Skype fro

We talk all things booze making: gastonomic, hedonic and sustainabilic. Bushy's mate former professional beer maker and now avid home brewer (and data journalist) Marc Moncrief joins us.